The digital age has brought enormous changes to the quality of life. Adaptation to digital media-enabled efficient communication, faster transactions, boosted productivity, and facilitated education for discoveries. It also gave people a voice, a platform where they could be freely involved in civic and political participation. And with humanity’s creative thinking, digital media was used for enlightenment in a non-traditional way. Drawing a simultaneous relationship between comedic concepts and social criticism, satirical social media pages are made.
Anyone with access to the internet and gadgets could activate satirical pages on platforms like Facebook. Such pages spread satire news which tends to become viral. Satirical news is best described with its comedic nature. Using humor to spread manipulated information from a real statement of a personality, politician, event, and a trend. In the Philippine setting, a popular example is “Cebu Dairy News”. Without fact-checking, the page can be mistaken for a credible source due to the publication materials they post.
The satirical page’s primary objective is to provoke social involvement and change. While that is the case for digital natives, the generation who grew up without proper knowledge of social media is prone to deception from fake news and biased content. Digital immigrants are people from ages 30 and older who are not exposed to the digital environment in their younger years. Their weakness is the unfamiliarity of social media, how it works, and determining reliable information shown in that setting.
According to research conducted on fake news dissemination, the older generation is four times more likely to spread fake news than the youth. This data is proof that not being knowledgeable enough of satirical news can cause vulnerability in attacks of misinformation and disinformation. It may provoke their political ideologies and misled them into thinking the other way. Although that is the case, the use of satires is proven to be a tool for change in political engagements.
The exaggeration expressed by satire pages reflects the intensity of national issues that are in dire need of attention. Since it has the tendency to cater to more individuals, it has a higher possibility of raising awareness. Whether you are the right audience for it or not, it was disseminated to challenge perceptions. Through satire news and pages, we can now confront injustices and the reality of this country that we are fighting for.
Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not reflect the view of POLITICO.PH
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Kristine Mae D. Cruz is a senior student of Communication at Far Eastern University-Manila and is currently an intern at Brown Bag Communications Inc. under PageOne Media. As a student, she has developed skills in research and writing articles for websites and magazines. Writing has been a passion of hers as well as the occasional binge-watching of historical documentaries. With media as her line of industry, she intends to seek the truth and create unbiased content as a representative of the Fourth Estate.